A Peek Inside the Erlang Compiler

Erlang is a complex system, and I can’t do its inner workings justice in a short article, but I wanted to give some insight into what goes on when a module is compiled and loaded. As with most compilers, the first step is to convert the textual source to an abstract syntax tree, but that’s unremarkable. What is interesting is that the code goes through three major representations, and you can look at each of them.

Just in case you wanted to know more about Erlang than you found in the crash course.

A deeper understanding of any language is useful. Understanding “why” a construction works is the first step to writing a better one.

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on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Erlang.
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